Is it possible to transmit and receive smell?

If I have a color document that has information on it like a schematic I can scan it and email it to you and your printer can replicate it. We are not transporting the document like star trek we are analyzing it and turning it into a digital model, transmitting it, and then reassembling a facsimile using a printer. There is no reason that we could not sample an odor in the air with suitable sensors, digitize the data, send it to a suitable machine that could dispense aerosol of any number of chemicals into the air at the receiving end to replicate the odor. I do not see the difference between sending color information as opposed to olfactory information. The difference is only in the importance of the information to present day communications. The colors of the schematic are important to us. Whether the schematic smells like ink, or old wood, or my spilled Old Spice is irrelevant to most of our important technical and interpersonal communications. D_Hersey rightly points out the a lot of our brain mass is dedicated to smell. I do not know why this does't make smell more important in our lives but it probably goes back to evolutionary stages where it "was" more of a survival mechanism. This has evolved into a better discussion than I thought it would.

John

Right, we have a printer.  We would need a printer for smell, so if I wanted to send you the smell of lemon, your machine must reproduce the lemon molecules.

I suppose it could have numerous chemicals it could combine to make the smell.  But it would be very large and dangerous!

Hi!

Our sense of taste is not great in some ways. We think we're just evaluating what the tongue senses but part of 'taste' is the smell of something. We easily get confused when we have a cold.

And I can't tell the difference between what I think nail polish may taste like, and pear-flavoured jelly beans : ) If it wasn't green-coloured I would have no idea what it was, so looks play a part too, as does texture. Plus we have few ways to describe taste except with items, and items have a physical look. (Similarly I couldn't describe a pear smell without saying that it smelt like a pear, or a fruity smell, or a nail polish smell : ). The physical three items - pear, generic fruit, nail polish are completely different. I'd have to find a tangible item basically).

Basically in real terms when we say "taste", we don't just mean what the tongue is evaluating. We include the extra like smell and vision, so we say that a meal tasted delicious etc., we might say something different if we couldn't see it or if it wasn't juicy when it should be, etc.

So, probably smell can be confused too without visual prompts. It is maybe possibly that only a subset of smells are needed, and with the right prompts, we can be fooled into thinking it is something it isn't. In other words, if we need a device (can't think why though, but others may have needs for it) that conveys smell, then it could be restricted to a device with fewer chemicals, that needs to be used combined with vision perhaps!

However this does mean that the sensor device would also need to combine smell with (say) vision in order to transmit the correct data for the

smell generator..

Hi!

Our sense of taste is not great in some ways. We think we're just evaluating what the tongue senses but part of 'taste' is the smell of something. We easily get confused when we have a cold.

And I can't tell the difference between what I think nail polish may taste like, and pear-flavoured jelly beans : ) If it wasn't green-coloured I would have no idea what it was, so looks play a part too, as does texture. Plus we have few ways to describe taste except with items, and items have a physical look. (Similarly I couldn't describe a pear smell without saying that it smelt like a pear, or a fruity smell, or a nail polish smell : ). The physical three items - pear, generic fruit, nail polish are completely different. I'd have to find a tangible item basically).

Basically in real terms when we say "taste", we don't just mean what the tongue is evaluating. We include the extra like smell and vision, so we say that a meal tasted delicious etc., we might say something different if we couldn't see it or if it wasn't juicy when it should be, etc.

So, probably smell can be confused too without visual prompts. It is maybe possibly that only a subset of smells are needed, and with the right prompts, we can be fooled into thinking it is something it isn't. In other words, if we need a device (can't think why though, but others may have needs for it) that conveys smell, then it could be restricted to a device with fewer chemicals, that needs to be used combined with vision perhaps!

However this does mean that the sensor device would also need to combine smell with (say) vision in order to transmit the correct data for the

smell generator..